I don’t know about you guys, but I sure have a love/hate relationship with a lot of rock music. While I love rock and roll with almost every fiber of my being, I also despise a lot of it because of the frequent recycling/diluting of whatever happens to be en vogue at the moment and/or the ignorance of what a minimum of instrumentation can do. I tend to be drawn towards pop music that typically exists outside of the hype machine and that understands when a song needs 100 instruments and when it needs just one.
Slomo Drags is a band that clearly understands the art of song arrangement while simultaneously giving the middle finger to all the haters and trendy pop poseurs out there (full disclosure: I used to play with Slomo Drags songwriter Jackson Albracht’s previous band Cartographers). As a result, their self-titled EP is a masterpiece of minimal pop complexity. These four tracks use standard four-piece rock instrumentation in an idiomatic manner similar to the stripped down intricacy of Women’s pointillistic arrangements on Public Strain (TMT Review). Each song is ripe with harmonic complexity, instantly memorable melodies, and some of the most cutting lyrics around. It’s a dizzyingly infectious debut that quickly places the band’s music in the same circle as likeminded contemporaries such as Chris Weisman and Great Valley.
Slomo Drags is available now as a free download via Bandcamp. You can stream the album in its entirety below:
• Slomo Drags http://www.slomodrags.bandcamp.com
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